How do I overclock?

[Pteroduck]

I'm curious about overclocking my card. I have two GTX 660ti's and I want to push some more frames on them.
I'm using MSI after burner. What does what? I'm confused

[SpikeSoprano]

They have a tutorial on their site on what to do, what brand of card do you have as every brand is different, i have a stock zotac 660 so I went to their site and found out what the higher end/ more expensive 660's were clocked at so first I raised my core mhz and memory mhz to the higher card specs and it worked out fine. Use open hw monitor to see what changes you made changed in respect to your card.

[Pteroduck]

I have EVGA 660's. I'm also curious on what affects what? Such as core voltage, core clock, shader clock, and memory clock

[SpikeSoprano]

Starting out I didn't touch the voltages, if you go too high it's very easy to blow your card, you could try moving the core clocks 25 mhz at a time and also the memory 50mhz at a time . the shader clock moves automatically with the core mhz so don't worry about it. When i game I set my card from core clock 993mhz to 1075 mhz and the memory from 6008 mhz to 6300 mhz and it gives me about 7 to 10 fps boost .  bump these up until you notice problems or articfacs , it will give you a good idea what your cards are capable of.

 

Evga has a software similar ti afterburner that you might find more user friendly, i use zotac program because it shows the amount of oc'ing in mhz where msi shows % on their newer software.

Edited December 10, 2013 by SpikeSoprano

[SpikeSoprano]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6159/

 

This is a very good review on oc'ing 660's.

[Innocent]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6159/

 

This is a very good review on oc'ing 660's.

Hi,

 

I have amd radeon 7990 hdand i am new in OC. Please can u give some suggestions about software for OC and how much i will increase?

 

Processor: Intel i7 3930k

MOB: Rampage iv Extreme

SD: Corsair 120 force gt

Memory: Kingston hyper x beast 32 GB 2400 mhz

Graphics: AMD Radeon 7990 HD

Power Supply: Corsair 1200w

Fan: Antic not remember exactly (1 cooling fan only)

Case : Cooler Master HAF XM

[SpikeSoprano]

Innocent, on 10 Dec 2013 - 1:34 PM, said:

 

SpikeSoprano, on 10 Dec 2013 - 01:46 AM, said:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6159/

 

This is a very good review on oc'ing 660's.

Hi,

 

I have amd radeon 7990 hdand i am new in OC. Please can u give some suggestions about software for OC and how much i will increase?

 

Processor: Intel i7 3930k

MOB: Rampage iv Extreme

SD: Corsair 120 force gt

Memory: Kingston hyper x beast 32 GB 2400 mhz

Graphics: AMD Radeon 7990 HD

Power Supply: Corsair 1200w

Fan: Antic not remember exactly (1 cooling fan only)

Case : Cooler Master HAF XM

 

If you have a hd 7990 why would you need to oc it? It should handle anything you throw at it.

[wevsspot]

Probably going to sound like a Debbie Downer here, but come on guys.  Just about every major card partner has their own software based overclocking utilities now.  eVGA has PrecisionX, MSI has Afterburner, Sapphire has TriXX and so on and so on.

 

If in doubt grab the software overclocking utility provided by your card maker.  Read the user guide or the multitude of guides already written for your card and the specific overclocking utility you're going to use.

 

Some simple rules of thumb;

 

1. See what it will do on stock voltage first

2. Watch gpu temperatures

3. Overclock gpu core first using small increments.  When you start getting hard locks, blue screens or driver has stopped responding failures, back the gpu clock down 10Mhz and retest

4. After establishing your max gpu core clock, return it back to stock and start overclocking the memory

5. Overclock memory using small increments (however the memory increments can usually be in larger steps than the gpu core increments - Spike's recommended increments are OK, but I  usually go 10Mhz step on core and 25Mhz step on memory).  Once you start seeing artifcacts or other anomalies on the screen you'll know that you need to stop and back off the memory speed by 10Mhz or more.

6. Once you've established max gpu core speed and max memory speed you can use the third party software to lock in the overclock settings, apply them at startup, create custom fan profiles and so on

7. Be advised that in some instances you'll have to slightly decrease max gpu core and max memory speed in order to get them to play together nicely

8. Don't assume that because your overclock will pass synthetic stress testing like furmark, occt, vantage, heaven, 3dmark etc. that it will be stable in graphic intensive games.  You'll have to confirm that through actual use.

9. Overclocked video cards consume more power than the stock versions, so take that into account when determining whether your power supply is up to the task

 

At this point you can decide whether you want to push it further via voltage tweaks.  Remember, regardless of what the software says your voltage is, most of the time the card vendors have a hard voltage lock in the video card BIOS.  Other voltage caps may be dependent on hardware used when building the card, which can sometimes be "worked" around by hard voltage mods on the cards themselves.

 

Lastly, remember if you break it you don't have anyone to blame but yourself.  On a closing note; if you're asking how to overclock a video card using software, you shouldn't even be considering messing with custom or modified BIOS for your card, or doing hard mods on your video card. 

 

To save some time, you can research what users of your particular card are already achieving overclock wise.  You can usually start at the worst case overclocking result and work your way up from there.

[SpikeSoprano]

Well said Wev, I kinda lost interest after the 7990 question .

[DanTheGamer11]

The guy with the 7990 might want more than one case fan too?